SevOne announced today that it has integrated technology from its recent acquisition of RapidEngines into a new performance log appliance offering.

RapidEngines’ time-series data technology is designed to provide fast, flexible analysis of unstructured information. SevOne’s integration will apply that analytical muscle to network performance data, with the idea of digging up root causes for issues through automated correlation.

This could help reveal, say, a firewall problem that is blocking a particular service. The product is available both as an appliance and in a virtual edition that sits in the data center.

The ability to quickly analyze log data is increasingly important to network managers, according to Jim Frey, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates.

“Log data is being used by network managers to keep on top of what’s going on,” he said. “But it’s always been challenging to figure out how to fit that data into the other data tools that you have.”

According to Frey, correlating log data with network performance is a particularly powerful tool, but one for which network managers have not, hitherto, had a specialized option.

“If you see a change in performance, one of the really interesting things to know as quickly as possible is ‘has any part of my infrastructure been reconfigured recently?’” he said. “There may be accidental fat-fingering going on, or there may be some configuration change where the full impact was not understood when the change was made.”

SevOne was ranked in the “niche players” corner of the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant report for network performance management, which was released in March. The report’s author, Jonah Kowall, praised the company’s peer-to-peer architecture and rapid flow analysis engine, but warned that SevOne was overly dependent on third-party technologies for some functionality.

The RapidEngines acquisition, which was announced just a month after the Gartner report was issued, could go some way to alleviating that concern, bringing new technology in-house as it does.